--- title: "DAWO Wants a Dutch Public Workstation Built on NixOS" description: "The DAWO collective has published the outline of its open workstation for Dutch public administration, with an in-house system called DAWO-NixOS. It is a set of swappable parts, where public IT usually buys one indivisible lump." canonical: https://inyourgeek.com/en/articles/2026-09-25-dawo-veut-un-poste-de-travail-public-neerlandais-bati type: article author: "Sébastien Soulier" publisher: "InYourGeek" language: en datePublished: 2026-09-25 dateModified: 2026-09-25 section: "Software" tags: ["nixos", "souverainete", "administration"] --- # DAWO Wants a Dutch Public Workstation Built on NixOS > The DAWO collective has published the outline of its open workstation for Dutch public administration, with an in-house system called DAWO-NixOS. It is a set of swappable parts, where public IT usually buys one indivisible lump. September 25, 2026 · Software · 3 min ## A collective, five goals, no single product Spotted on 25 September 2026 via Hacker News, [the DAWO collective's site](https://www.dawo.community/en/) introduces a community whose stated mission is to bring public values and technology closer together. Five goals are listed: strengthening the digital autonomy of the Netherlands, improving collaboration and knowledge sharing between government and society, guaranteeing security and data protection, encouraging innovation and more efficient ways of working, and making state IT systems easier to inspect and verify. The guiding principle fits in one sentence lifted from the site: an open workstation is not a single product, but distinct building blocks that work together, each one inspectable and replaceable. That is the exact opposite of the usual public procurement model, where you sign for a coherent whole and find out three years later that the coherence was mostly in the contract. ## Four families of blocks, one of them a branded NixOS The site sorts those components into four families. AI, with blocks described as open and verifiable for the workstation. The operating system, where DAWO-NixOS shows up, along with installation blocks for a workstation described as reproducible. Cloud, for autonomous and verifiable infrastructure. And collaboration: communication, documents, working together. Each family links out to its own list of components, and a full overall plan is offered separately. The project's day-to-day life happens elsewhere, on a member portal: a calendar of meetups and workshops, news, a blog, a forum. Everything is public to read, and you need an account to write. The collective stresses that government, industry and open source are building the same plan, and that you can pitch in through discussion, code, documentation, pilots or events. ## What reproducibility actually changes across a fleet The site does not go into technical detail: it uses the word reproducible and moves on. In the Nix world, the word usually means a workstation is described in a file rather than assembled through a long series of manual installs — the same description produces the same machine, and you roll back by pointing at the previous state. For a public fleet, the payoff maps straight onto that fifth goal, verifiability. A described workstation can be read, and therefore audited, which is not really true of a machine that has been patched for six years. It can also be compared: two boxes that are supposed to be identical either are, or the difference is written down somewhere. Less thrilling than a sovereignty announcement, but it is the part that makes one checkable. ## What the page doesn't say Plenty, and it deserves saying out loud. No timeline, no named pilot administration, no number of deployed workstations, no version or licence quoted. No vendor is named either: the incumbent supplier of the public workstation appears nowhere on this page, the collective describing what it is building rather than what it is walking away from. A sovereign workstation is judged by how many civil servants boot it on a Monday morning, not by how many blocks fit on a landing page. For now DAWO has published a plan and opened a forum, which is still more than most of the genre ever gets around to. ## Sources - [Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS](https://www.dawo.community/en/) — dawo.community _Article written with AI assistance from the cited sources, reviewed and approved by a human before publication._ --- Equivalent HTML page : https://inyourgeek.com/en/articles/2026-09-25-dawo-veut-un-poste-de-travail-public-neerlandais-bati Published by InYourGeek — https://inyourgeek.com/en/a-propos Method and safeguards : https://inyourgeek.com/en/methode All articles : https://inyourgeek.com/en/archives